It may be lovely, but Sony’s under-powered P-series costs too much and features features poor battery life.

If you've been fantasising about a slate PC that would look at home in Arthur Dent's satchel, read on.

This notebook has been designed with classic Sony style: rounded edges, hidden IO inputs and a sleek widescreen footprint. From a connectivity point of view, this 'book has it all, boasting front-mounted Memory Stick Pro port, iLink 4-pin FireWire port and three USB ports.

Small but perfectly formed, the D420 has hours of battery life and loads of features and great ergonomics.

It’s great value and will tempt some people thanks to its size and multimedia abilities.

Reasonable performance, great features and good battery life all make this a decent business ultraportable. But Lenovo’s X60 is better.

Not perfect, but the best all-rounder.

The sweet taste of AM2, in the form of an ultraportable powerhouse.

Small, powerful and relatively cheap. This baby notebook is an ideal travel companion.

Small but packed with features, this Lifebook is a stunner.

Sony does it again with a Notebook to die for.

Toshiba’s R100 redefined what it meant to be an ultra-portable laptop.

While many ultraportable laptops, like the Toshiba R200 go all out to get size and weight to an absolute minimum, a great deal of usability is often sacrificed – the X505 is impractically small for constant daily usage while the R200 has limited battery sizes.

Not all multimedia notebooks have to weigh in around the $5000 mark. Digital Star’s 15.4in widescreen PowerNote Z71V offers very good value for money for a laptop sporting a 2GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM and a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 graphics chip.

Stylish and packed with features, it is not the cheapest 12 inch notebook available. This said, if you simply must have the features on offer inside this 'book, then this notebook does it all with style.

Widescreen is still one of the flavours of the month for notebooks and plenty of users are opting to banish boring old 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panels to the land of wind and ghosts.

The 9300 is reminiscent of its predecessor, the Inspiron 9100, which was pitched squarely at power users and gamers looking for plenty of grunt. This product refresh takes it one step further by using a mobile processor rather than the desktop CPU found in the 9100.

The look of the HP Compaq NC6000_106 is pure business with its black casing and silver trim. It's also one of the heavier laptops at 2.9kg.

The Portege A200 also has many of the necessary features we would expect in an education notebook, including LAN and modem ports, two USB ports, a DVD-ROM, and 802.11b/g with an wireless on/off switch.

Sony typically asks a little more than their competitors for similar products, but this usually pays off in the quality of workmanship and the reliability associated with most Sony products. The Sony VAIO VGN-S28GP is an extremely well-built notebook and should provide rock-solid performance for years to come.